On the Market: Land Rush on the East Williamsburg/Bushwick Border

After tussling with another developer over an industrial site on the border of East Williamsburg and Bushwick, Long Island-based Hornig Capital Partners has agreed to pay $36 million to take possession of 95 Evergreen Avenue, Crain’s reports. The new owners are, it seems, angling for a residential rezoning. The deal is just the latest in a mini land rush in the industrial area, spurred in part by stats like these: Bushwick home prices have increased a shocking 31.2 percent, according to Gothamist.

Affordable housing activists marched in Harlem yesterday, as The Commercial Observer reported, pushing for the de Blasio administration to set aside half of all units built in areas rezoned for denser development to be affordable, with the requirement keeping land prices from skyrocketing as they have in areas like the East Williamsburg border. REBNY, however, claimed the plan was not feasible in an interview with Crain’s. “The success of the new housing development analysis that we have discussed with advocates, relies upon the accuracy of extremely optimistic assumptions,” said REBNY president Steven Spinola.

The ASPCA has euthanized a West Village homeless man’s dog without telling him after police confiscated the animal in response to called-in complaints about an open wound on the dog’s back, DNAInfo reports. But the wound was actually a tumor that the dog’s owner, James Tarangelo, who has lived in a van since losing the apartment where he grew up on Leroy Street, had raised money to have treated.

Midtown has lost is luster for commercial tenants, Bloomberg reports, with landlords aggressively marketing property and seeking early lease renewals to stop tenants from moving Downtown or signing leases for Hudson Yards: “Midtown, from 30th Street to Central Park South at 59th Street, have more vacant blocks of contiguous office space than at the height of the recession in 2009.” Tenants are opting for value over prestige, they conclude. And quite honestly, for many companies, there’s more prestige to be gleaned from a Class B building in a hip neighborhood than a fusty Class A in Midtown. Maybe this will rightly show the de Blasio administration that the Midtown East rezoning is not a priority, but probably it will only make real estate boosters yowl all the more loudly for it.

Are subway yogis the new subway break dancers? asks Gothamist. Well, they note, nature abhors a vacuum and apparently flexible straphangers have taken to posting pictures of themselves stretching all over the floors and seats of train cars (which may well offset the health benefits of yoga in the first place). We never thought we’d say this, but we miss the showtime dancers.